Ellsworth Ausby (1942-2011)

Afro-Futurist abstract painter and illustrator, Ellsworth Ausby was born in Portsmouth, Virginia and studied at the American Art School, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute, NYC. He became a professor of art in 1978 at the School of Visual Arts.

Ausby introduced the forms and the palette of traditional African art into both the geometric sensibility of American hard-edge painting and, later, the post-minimalist sensuality of the Pattern and Decoration movement.

- Fateman, Johanna, Art - Ellsworth Ausby, The New Yorker,

Ausby worked in a variety of mediums, including canvas, sculpture, stained glass, and performance art. He often worked with traditional African forms and palettes, and was heavily inspired by the music of Sun Ra. In the late 1970s began his series of geometric experimentation paintings titled Space Odyssey, named as such to reflect this connection to Sun Ra’s afrofuturist philosophies. He would continue to work on the series for several years. As time went on, Ausby began to incorporate more three-dimensional elements into his work, mixing substances such as sawdust into his paint in order to create more textured works and incorporating relief elements which extended off the surface of the canvas. He often used unstretched canvas in his work, which would be attached directly to gallery walls and other structural supports to create dynamic three-dimensional shapes for exhibition.

In 1978 and 1979, Ausby received artist grants through the Cultural Council Foundation Artists’ Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Through these grants, Ausby was able to direct the multimedia performance piece InnerSpace/OuterSpace, which was performed at the Museum of Natural History, New York and incorporated projections of his paintings and sculptures. In 2005, Ausby was commissioned by the MTA to design the stained glass piece Space Odyssey, which is now installed at the Marcy Avenue station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

His Meditation in Blue (1998), a geometric abstraction in acrylic, is housed in the permanent collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Exhibitions

1969 New Black Artists, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY

1970 Cinque Gallery, NY (solo)

Afro-American Artists: NY & Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Ancestral Spirit; Regeneration of the Spirit

1971 Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney Museum of Art, NY

Fifteen Under Forty, Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center, NY

Some American History, Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX

1972. Ellsworth Ausby and James Phillips, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA

1973 Ornette Coleman’s Artist House, NY (solo)

Millennium, Department of Urban Outreach of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Civic Center

1974 Directions in Afro-American Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY; Aquarius, The Phoenix, Shabazz, Sunrise-Sunset

Contemporary Reflections, 1973-74, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT

1980 Afro-American Abstraction: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Nineteen Black American Artists, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY

1982. Afro-American Abstraction, Art Museum Organization Traveling Exhibition

1999 Black New York Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY

2000 Blackness in Color: Visual Expressions of the Black Arts Movement, Cornell University, NY

2005. When Brooklyn Artists Speak, Art Listens, Pratt Institute and Brooklyn Burough Hall Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2023. Ellsworth Ausby: Odyssey, Houston Museum of African American Culture, TX